It's a coincidence worthy of Forrest Gump himself. Screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for telling everyone life was like a box of chocolates, was turning in a draft for Gump and Co., a sequel to the movie that made himself and everyone who worked on it a bascrillion dollars. It had been seven years since the original movie, but when Roth turned in the script on September 10, 2001, he felt enthusiastic about the sequel's prospects.
Well, suffice it to say circumstances changed. As Roth told Slashfilm, "We sat down, Tom [Hanks] and Bob [Zemeckis] and I, looked at each other and said, we don’t think this is relevant anymore. The world had changed."
Happily, Roth doesn't think that the passage of time since 9/11 means a Forrest Gump 2 is any more likely. "Now time has obviously passed, but maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are.”
It feels almost miraculous to hear someone in Hollywood say that something is better left alone, and God bless you Eric Roth for leaving Forrest Gump exactly where he is-- on a park bench, watching a feather, blissfully absent from this decade.
